By Jonathan D. Spence
No matter if learn for its strong account of the biggest rebellion in human heritage, or for its foreshadowing of the negative convulsions suffered via twentieth-century China, or for the narrative energy of a good historian at his most sensible, God's chinese language Son needs to be learn.
At the heart of this heritage of China's Taiping uprising (1845-64) stands Hong Xiuquan, a failed pupil of Confucian doctrine who ascends to heaven in a dream and meets his heavenly kin: God, Mary, and his older brother, Jesus. He returns to earth charged to eliminate the "demon-devils," the alien Manchu rulers of China.
His luck includes him and his fans to the heavenly capital at Nanjing, the place they rule a wide a part of south China for greater than a decade. Their decline and fall, wrought via inner department and the unrelenting army pressures of the Manchus and the Western powers, hold them to a hell on the earth. Twenty million chinese language are left useless.
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Additional resources for God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
Example text
Volume Two, a sourcebook and research guide, contains articles by Chinese historians on traditional Chinese awareness about Jews; recollections of life in China by former Jewish residents, including a distinguished diplomat, an academic, an attorney, and a journalist/editor; guides to specific collections of source material about Jews in China; and a bibliography. The authors and translators of these articles are citizens of the United States (21), China (7), Israel (3), the United Kingdom (2), Japan (1), and Italy (1).
Were certain holidays or rituals added to the life cycle? Did aspects of the Jews' ritual life help them integrate into the society of China or set them apart? How did Jews in China see themselves vis-à-vis their neighbors and Jews elsewhere? Did they even know that there were Jewish communities in existence elsewhere? What was the nature of Jewish communal institutions in China, so basic to the preservation of "community" among Jews in Europe, the Middle East, and India? How did Jews represent themselves to the non-Jewish community around them?
Historian Joan G. Roland discusses the nineteenth century arrival in Hong Kong and Shanghai of Baghdadi Jews from India. She then contrasts the role of Baghdadi Jews in China with their even longer experience in India. Historian Lane Earns explains the role of the Japanese transit point of Nagasaki for Jews reaching China. By the early twentieth century Yokohama and Kobe also served this purpose. Thus, journalist Israel Epstein's father, Lazer, moved his young family from Warsaw, Russian Poland, to Kobe and thence to Harbin and Tianjin.